Paul Hopkins: Ozzy and the heady days of the hell-raisers

It seems like yesterday when Oliver Reed appeared on The Late Late Show and was obviously three sheets to the wind but Gay Byrne, with great aplomb, carried on interviewing an incoherent Reed who kept nodding off.

As he told Byrne, he and his cohorts “didn't live in the world of sobriety".

Reed, back then, was what we called a hell-raiser, as too were our own Richard Harris and Peter O'Toole and the mercurial Richard Burton.

The '70s and the '80s saw a subculture of such hell-raisers – intriguing characters known for their flamboyant, often self-destructive lifestyles, particularly within the entertainment business.

They had the money to enable such egomaniacal extravagance.

As George Best told Michael Parkinson: “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars… the rest I squandered!” And: “I’ve stopped drinking but only while I’m asleep.”

The escapades of the hell-raisers in making the headlines contributed to their notoriety and the public fascination with their emboldened behaviour.

Ozzy Osbourne embodied the hell-raising rock star when he first found fame as the front man of Black Sabbath. He even penned a song called ‘Hell-raiser’: "I'm living on an endless road/Around the world for rock 'n' roll/Sometimes it feels so tough/But I still ain’t had enough..."

The gothic stage persona and the heavy rock with Osbourne’s trademark vocals made songs like ‘Paranoid’ well known across the airwaves. The Prince of Darkness never failed to shock, his most infamous moment being, arguably, when he bit the head off a bat that someone had thrown on stage.

Another time, he snorted ants during a gig.

In her book ‘The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne’, his wife Sharon claims he tried to strangle her when high on drugs. The police arrived but Sharon declined to file a complaint.

With addiction issues dogging him, it was his wife who would eventually help him clean up his act, and settle into domesticity with her and their family.

Sharon's managerial acumen ensured that a more respectable lifestyle in Los Angeles was ideal reality TV fodder as the hell-raiser toned his act down.

To understand the significance of popular culture in the ‘70s and the '80s, one must understand that the 1960s – this writer's early rock 'n' roll years – was a Pandora’s box of sorts.

The '60s were explosive insofar as racial barriers were breaking down, and the young, the hippies, were having their voice, as the conscience of America over Vietnam was loudly proclaimed as the beginning of questioning the operations of governments – and then the influence of radical new ideas in film and music.

Rock and pop musicians exhibited their own personal identities in their music.

From Clearwater Revival to Kraftwerk and everything in between, the music was innovative and original – and sometimes outlandish and provocative.

By the next decade, films began exploring subjects and topics in realistic and thought-provoking ways that exceeded and expounded on what had begun in the ‘60s.

And while the '70s was an era of experimentation and new ideas, as epitomised by Osbourne and others, the '80s brought film and music to a new sense of gloss and exuberance – but continuing those hell-raising days.

Actors and musicians were elevated to a new sense of celebrity which had not been seen since the Beatles invaded America in the ‘60s.

Artists like Osbourne were worshipped by fans to almost the level of deity.

Everyone knew who they were, whether or not they listened to their music.

As Peter Sellers noted back then: "Burton, Harris, O'Toole and Ollie Reed were the greatest drinkers of all time. They're from pretty much the same generation. They all worked together. There was a lot of cross-fertilisation going on. They drank together, they whored together, and they worked together. So it made perfect sense to group them together."

If that set of credentials is their lasting legacy, what is the legacy of Ozzy Osbourne, one of the last of the rock 'n' roll hell-raisers to cast of the mortal coil?

Undoubtedly, he helped shape an entire music genre and subculture. Osbourne’s legacy lies, perhaps, in how we understand performance, rebellion, and the expressive power of sound itself.

The music industry is filled with tales of excess and wild behaviour, some of it suspiciously sinister.

The age of the degenerate, uncontrollable rockstar hell-raiser is fast fading, with the passing of Ozzy Osbourne, but there will always be the stories to revel in, to be wowed by – and sometimes appalled by.